Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Is there light at the end of the tea-time?

I'm not sure if it was the happy ending of "28 days later" (which I just watched), the thought of returning to England for a bit of R&R, the mental release following yet another meaningless product release cycle at work, or what?. Whatever it is I'm left feeling strangely ebullient that things aren't as bad as they sometimes seem, or at least as I portray them in this blog. Looking back at some previous tea-time entries I can see that sometimes I imply the world is a very dark, dark place indeed. Yes, there's even a certain amount of rage in my writings, not of the "28 days later" kind though, more like outrage. But mostly there's a lot of frustration, frustration that the big changes in the world I'd like to see in my life time are never going to happen. There will still be people labeled as terrorists and people waging wars on them, there will still be pollution, the earth will still be warming, vast numbers of people will still be living in poverty and people will still be dying after living unspeakably miserable lives.

Yes, its depressing and awful to contemplate, its even enough to make you want to scream and shout, protest in the streets, or just plain give up. Maybe in 100 years, or 200 years or 500 years things will have change. My 25th Century counterpart may even extract my blog from archaic printed historical documents and contemplate how awful, primative and barbaric 21st Century life was just as I do when reading about genocide in 1492. However its our phenomenal fortune to placed in a position to contemplate our lot in life. To see with great perspective from whence the human race has come and to realize that while there is only one past, that there are many possible futures. We can see that even if there are unlikely to be many giant leaps "for mankind" in our lifetimes, there will be many small steps to be made. Every journey begins with one step and, if it reaches an end at all, is a journey of continuous steps all the way in between.

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